Disk drives and other sorts of devices are typically connected to a host computer through a host interface connector for the transfer of commands, status and data. For example, the host computer accesses the disk drive and reads data from the disk drive and/or saves data to the disk drive. The host computer can be connected to an external storage device, such as a hard disk drive, by a parallel interface, or in more recent examples, by a serial interface. Examples of a serial standard include the Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) standard and the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) standard.
Many host devices have features or system-level dependencies that require information on the current operating state of a storage device. Some host devices use a type of device interface that support a “side-band” or “out-of-band” form of access to such information, such as, devices implementing the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) interface over an Enclosure Services Interface (ESI). Other host devices can retrieve such information by periodically polling the storage device, which actively maintains the information. For example, with a storage device supporting the SAS standard, the host device can issue commands to the storage device over the SAS interface to retrieve this information, for example, issuing log retrieval commands (e.g., “log sense”) to various log pages of the storage device that store the information and other log data.